The Victorian Sonnet

Much poetry of the Victorian period is no longer very highly esteemed, for reasons that seem apparent after reading a number of sonnets--a sentimental self-indulgence and what F. R. Leavis called an "inferiority, in rigour and force, of intellectual content." Yet, when looked at individually, the poems are often graceful and moving, and their worst, most conventional excesses seem no more ridiculous than the stock courtly love sequences of the 16th and 17th centuries. Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), who wrote Sonnets from the Portuguese to her husband (Robert Browning (1812-1889)), is probably the most genuinely popular (and critically maligned) sonneteer of this period. Other British Victorian writers included here are Thomas Hood (1799-1845), Charles Tennyson Turner (1808-1879), and his more famous brother, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892).

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) wrote sonnets from the 1860s into the 1920s, and his characteristic irony and sensitivity as well as the concentrated ebullience of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) seem to defy literary trends of their time.